Examinations of the mental health trauma that Hurricane Katrina inflicted on residents of the New Orleans area in 2005 were among the first orders of business as the world's largest psychiatric meeting got under way Saturday at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center.

Organizers said about 14,000 members of the American Psychiatric Association have registered to attend the workshops and seminars of the group’s annual gathering, which runs through Wednesday. Thousands have booked hotel rooms and made plans to dine in the city’s restaurants.

The association billed two Katrina-themed workshops Saturday as “major events.”

During a session that in part discussed the effects the catastrophe had on first responders, children and relocated survivors, University of Oklahoma psychiatrist Dr. Phebe Tucker said open-admission support groups are cost-effective ways for people displaced by a disaster to cope with the aftermath.

Tucker said that virtually all the survivors who evacuated to the university’s hometown of Norman, Okla., were traumatized by their loss of sense of community. Tucker and other psychiatrists organized support groups for the evacuees, and the sessions gave flood survivors an opportunity to ally with people who shared their experiences.

The support meetings attracted many single mothers and their young children. At first, Tucker said, there was distrust between the moderators and the storm victims. Many of the victims were impoverished African-Americans; the moderators were mostly affluent and white.

But the participants eventually grew comfortable enough to share parenting worries, economic concerns and stories of past traumas such as sexual abuse. The evacuees admitted that some aspects of life turned out to be better in Oklahoma, such as superior schools, safer streets and more affordable housing.

A support group “gives the sense of community lost in a flood,” Tucker said.

At the same workshop, Dr. Howard Osofsky, chairman of the Louisiana State University School of Medicine’s psychiatry department, defended the city’s first responders, some of whom were portrayed in news stories as deserting the city at the height of the crisis.

Osofsky said several police officers he treated after the flood had left New Orleans in efforts to find relatives they had not been able to contact. Many of them returned to their jobs after getting in touch with their loved ones, he said.

Single-parent first responders especially faced a dilemma, said Osofsky, who spent several months living with and counseling first responders housed on docked cruise ships after Katrina. “Should you be with your child?” Or “should you be with your community, where you should be for your job?”

At the second Katrina-themed session of the day, members of Greater New Orleans’ Behavioral Health Action Network, or BHAN, highlighted the challenges psychiatrists working in disaster zones can expect to face.

The group said the rate of mental illness doubled after Katrina while the number of beds for mental patients plummeted. The rate at which medical staff members took family, personal or medical leave jumped by 267 percent. Employees “burned out” at a 40 percent rate, and medical agencies competed for the few workers not displaced by the flood.

“Disaster exposed the fault lines of the city,” including in its mental health structures, said Dr. Elmore Rigamer, the medical director of Catholic Charities, who helped found BHAN to move mental health care out of hospitals and into clinics and day programs.

Rigamer said the fate of post-disaster mental health treatment hinges upon the area’s political climate. Local programs are bracing for deep cuts after Gov. Bobby Jindal recently proposed subtracting $30 million from the budget of the state’s Office of Mental Health in response to a decrease in available federal funds.

Meanwhile, various groups must contribute resources if a BHAN-type coalition is to succeed, the group suggested. BHAN draws resources from coroner’s offices and law enforcement agencies in Jefferson and Orleans parishes, the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, university psychiatry departments, local hospitals and faith-based ministries